The Ramen Rater: Unpackaged
Sienna Solis-Stokes
The Ramen Rater
Instant ramen is more than survival food — it’s a global industry with hardcore enthusiasts. AKA ramenphiles.
Since 2002, Hans Lienesch has been rating ramen on his blog The Ramen Rater. For a decade he posted daily reviews, and in 2012 he was interviewed by a local newspaper when his blog gained a cult following surrounding The Big List.
The Big List is just what it sounds like; a big list of all the ramen he has reviewed for 20+ years. The Ramen Rater has turned himself into a multifaceted brand with recipes, diet plans (yes, a ramen diet plan), merchandise, and international meet-ups with other ramenphiles.
As of 2025, The Big List contains 4,816 ramen reviews from 51 countries and 687 brands.
I’ll be using The Big List to unleash my inner ramenphile and answer some burning questions.
Counting Stars
Let’s get to know our reviewer first. Is he a harsh critic?
The Ramen Rater rates on a 1-5 star scale. Let’s look at his stats.
We can see that The Ramen Rater has had some pretty low rated ramens. But on the other hand, he clearly isn’t shy about giving out his 5-star ratings. Overall he shows a strong “middle of the road” rating average.
The Ramen Rater Stats
We know that The Ramen Rater has been reviewing ramen for more than two decades. I wonder if he has gotten “nicer” or “harsher” over the years. We’re going to run a linear model to see if we can show if The Ramen Rater has stayed consistent.
First let’s visualize the ratings of all reviews over time.
plot(stars~review, data_ramen)
This is a bit hard to interpret let’s try and simplify the visual.
Now we can look at what the statistics say to get to the bottom of The Ramen Rater’s consistency.
model_ratings.time <- lm(stars~review, data = data_ramen)
anova(model_ratings.time)## Analysis of Variance Table
##
## Response: stars
## Df Sum Sq Mean Sq F value Pr(>F)
## review 1 82.2 82.170 70.632 < 2.2e-16 ***
## Residuals 4814 5600.3 1.163
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1summary(model_ratings.time)##
## Call:
## lm(formula = stars ~ review, data = data_ramen)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -3.9646 -0.3826 0.1010 0.8185 1.5503
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 3.511e+00 3.118e-02 112.620 <2e-16 ***
## review 8.973e-05 1.068e-05 8.404 <2e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 1.079 on 4814 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.01446, Adjusted R-squared: 0.01426
## F-statistic: 70.63 on 1 and 4814 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16Results show that The Ramen Rater’s reviews have shifted slightly upward over time (F = 70.63, p <0.001).
In the early days, ratings averaged about 3.5 stars. Every 1,000 reviews corresponds to an increase of about 0.09 stars, which means that by his most recent reviews his average rating has increased by roughly 0.4 stars.
Statistically this is significant, but there may be other factors at play here. Maybe The Ramen Rater is just eating higher quality ramen now or maybe his love for ramen biases his reviews. Or (as one of my friends suggested) he’s had such terrible ramen that his standards for decent ramen have shifted.
Whatever the case may be, I feel pretty content with The Ramen Rater as a reliable and consistent ramen reviewer.
Cups, Bowls, Boxes, and Packs
Let’s dive a little deeper into The Ramen Rater psyche, shall we?
We can learn a bit about his preferences by looking at the different styles of ramen he’s reviewed. There are 4 styles of represented in the reviews: cup, bowl, box and pack.
I want to see if The Ramen Rater rated a certain style higher than the others.
Just looking at this plot, we might think that The Ramen Rater has rated box-style ramen the highest the most frequently.
Time to try that Lipton Cup-a-Soup!
However, there is a little bit of sample size discrepancy going on here.
The Ramen Rater reviewed 1,008 cups, 1,028 bowls, 2,656 packs, and only 124 boxes.
Let’s plot the data again, this time excluding the boxes from our
dataset.
From this figure, we can see that on average The Ramen Rater rated the pack-style ramen the highest.
I personally agree with this, I was raised on Chicken Flavor Top Ramen and I still crave it every time I’m feeling a little under the weather.
Top Ten Lists
Okay, so we’ve learned that pack-style ramen is Queen of the Ramen Rater universe.
But what about all the different brands The Ramen Rater has reviewed?
Below is a table of the most consistently Ramen Rater loved pack-style brands for your next ramen hankerings.
| Brand | Average Rating |
|---|---|
| MyKuali | 4.88 |
| Mom’s Dry Noodle | 4.81 |
| Vite Ramen | 4.40 |
| Samyang Foods | 4.31 |
| Itsuki | 4.28 |
| Mi Sedaap | 4.25 |
| Nongshim | 4.24 |
| Sapporo Ichiban | 4.23 |
| A-Sha | 4.22 |
| Myojo | 4.11 |
I’m a little disappointed to not see any of my favs on the list, but I will admit that my repertoire of ramen is not nearly as impressive as The Ramen Rater.
Looks like I’ll be putting MyKuali on the grocery list! But can I?
Where are theses brands manufactured?
We know that The Ramen Rater does international reviews. I’m curious which country manufactures the highest rated ramens.
Let’s see:| Country | Average Rating |
|---|---|
| Malaysia | 4.24 |
| Singapore | 4.14 |
| Indonesia | 4.11 |
| Taiwan | 3.97 |
| Hong Kong | 3.88 |
| South Korea | 3.88 |
| Japan | 3.79 |
| China | 3.67 |
| United States | 3.58 |
| India | 3.53 |
Malaysia is the country that manufactures the highest rated Ramen Rater ramens! And coincidentally that’s exactly where I’ll have to air-ship my MyKuali ramen order from.
Take-Aways
From instant packs to international hidden gems The Ramen Rater has created a ramen empire that inspires thousands of people on the daily. I know I’ll be scouring the internet for ways to get my hands on his 5-star picks, and who knows maybe I’ll even start my own blog.
I found this dataset on Kaggle.com! It’s free and I barely scratched the surface on potential datasets to practice with, go check it out :)